Big Smoke Street Corner

Manifesto

Rott635, one of my assumed online identities, is in the naming convention of the second generation of graffiti artists in the city in the early ’80s, which is to say when they stopped using their street number as an identifier (which can be traced back) and starting using their building number.

In the sense that tagging locations is effecting a deep, if ephemeral, imprint of oneself upon the social world, writing a blog, posting on forums and the like are the same. We have, now, the most universal, powerful and most importantly leaderless social tool in the history of humanity and our constant use of and love for pseudonyms become us.

More importantly, it affects the established structure in ways that completely undermine them. Bronx-borne subway trains took their markings down straight through the financial heart of the city, clearly pointing out that the city was not bound by interests the downtown socialites could control by forcing them to acknowledge an alternative and byzantine social structure that they themselves could and did not understand yet, ironically, had a hand in shaping.

By all rights, blogs are doing the same to what is an increasingly crystallized section of mass media, and while the effects are as yet blindly administered by people with a dim view of just how the system really works (on both ends), the struggle is clearly there.

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